A man in the arena

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause..."
Theodore Roosevelt

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

A Great Day for America

It is a great day for America, when I can say that my ancestral home has elected Senator Scott Brown.

V-J Day

Friday, August 14, 2009

The Zombies Must Shut Up

"I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking, I want them just to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess." - Obama

The "folks" that created this mess were FDR and his administration when they allowed companies to offer health insurance as a benefit under wage and price controls during WWII. Obviously, Obama knows this. What he is doing is obliquely referring to the threat we face from the undead. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

repeat then repeat then repeat...

On ReasonTV, Robert Samuelson describes the last 25 years of prosperity as a time when we forgot that crashes and downturns really do happen. "We lost our sense of risk." That is very similar to Kissinger's explanation of World War I. After a century without a major war the Europeans "lost their sense of the tragic."

Never learning from history, we seemed doomed to always be Santayana's bitch.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

half-assing your way to recovery

The Washington Post has an article (registration required) on the dropping poll numbers on Obama's stimulus plan. This is a shock? The plan is doomed. People are instinctively realizing this fact. I say instinctively, because most people don't study economics. So they don't realize that economic theory states that the plan is doomed.

The well-known theory about macroeconomics is Keynesian. And Keynesian theory states that in the midst of an economic slump, borrowing and spending by the government will revive underused assets, put money in people's hands, and jump-start the economy. Now I don't buy this theory. But even if I did buy it, Obama's plan wouldn't jump-start the economy.

The money has to be spent in order to stimulate the economy. Obama's plan spends most of the money in 2010 and later. Nobody is going to spend, money today because they hope to get a government job in 2011. If Obama was serious most of the stimulus would have been on the military. Expanding government military contracts would have been the quickest way to push money into the economy in 2009. The military knows how to spend money fast. It is not a big surprise that he didn't do that.

Obama is creating a huge deficit to support his environmental and health care goals. You may or may not agree with those goals, but they are not primarily being pursued to stimulate the economy. And people know it.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Game Changer

We have this mythical idea of the mass uprising. Gandhi "saved" India through peaceful protest. It was peaceful because the British decided not to keep killing Indians. They lost the stomach for colonial rule. Tienanmen Square was a nightmare because the PRC would use force. And guess what: 20 years later the communists still run the country.

Now we should be realistic and accept that the mullahs will be violent and eventually crush the protesters. However, however, if the reports are true and the Commander of the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps has been arrested for refusing to use force against the protesters the game has changed. The end may be near for the theocratic medievalists in Tehran. They mullahs can't use force if they don't control the force. We can only hope.